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Pretty much everyone by now should recognize that large parts of the world have needed to shutdown due to COVID-19 -- and you would hope that most people would be understanding that certain things may need to be delayed for a bit. But apparently not lawyer Michael Hierl from the law firm of Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym, and his client, a copyright licensing agency called Art Ask Agency, based in Spain. On March 9th, Art Ask Agency sued a bunch of unnamed defendants (their identity to be determined later), in US federal court in Illinois, over what it calls "counterfeit" images of a unicorn designed by artist Anne Stokes. Stokes apparently does brisk work in unicorn-related merchandise, as seen by her page on Art Agency's website:And, boy, is Art Agency ever so mad that there are "counterfeit" unicorns out there, which they claim violate Stokes trademark and copyright. Art Agency is so mad, that it's tossing out totally random fantasy numbers that have nothing to do with the specific works in this case:

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Adam Mossoff is one of the most vocal IP maximalist law professors around. He's never seemed to have met a form of artificial monopoly that he didn't want to expand. His latest is that he's claiming, laughably, that we should be extending patent terms in order to incentivize the creation of coronavirus vaccines. His argument is based on a misleading complaint that has been raised by plenty of pharmaceutical companies: they need to file their patent applications at the point of discovery, but they can't market a drug until it receives FDA approval, and that can take years, which cuts into the years over which they hold a monopoly and can extract insane monopoly rents.Mossoff says that now is the time to revisit that and to roll back the law that made it so the clock started so early, and to enable patent extensions to incentivize drug makers to create a coronavirus vaccine.

Last year wasn't a particularly good one for AT&T. Despite spending more than $150 billion in mergers in a bid to dominate the streaming video space, the company instead lost 4 million TV subscribers on the year, not exactly what company executives were aiming for. Not only did AT&T's mergers saddle the company with a mountain of debt, the company then tried to extract that debt from its customers in the form of numerous price hikes, ignoring that's not how streaming TV competition is going to work. The company also bumbled its streaming TV branding so badly, it confused even the company's own marketing and support departments.That's before you get to AT&T's empty promises in 2019, which include receiving billions in regulatory favors (like killing net neutrality and privacy rules at the FCC), subsidies, and $42 billion in Trump tax cuts for promises that never materialized. Not only did they not materialize, but AT&T actually engaged in the exact opposite behavior it had originally promised, trimming overall network investment and laying off nearly 37,000 jobs just since the Trump tax cuts were announced.Now your first question is probably but how is AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson doing in the wake of all this? Well you'll be happy to know he's just fine: Stephenson received a record $32 million in compensation in 2019, despite a wave of bungled merger mania so intense it even pissed off the company's investors, triggering a revolt. But yes, good job, Randall:

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the patent troll "Labrador Diagnostics LLC" trying to block COVID-19 testing with help from the Monkey Selfie law firm. In first place, it's That One Guy summing up how most people feel:

This is it: the last in our series of posts focusing on each winner from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924! So far, we've featured Hot Water, Legends of Charlemagne, 192X, The Hounds Follow All Things Down, and You Are The Rats In The Walls, and now it's time to wrap things up with the winner of Best Analog Game and a game that, perhaps most out of all the entries, is completely suffused with a spirit of remixing and mining the public domain: The 24th Kandinsky by David Harris.This game was one of the first to draw our attention as the entries were coming in, just based on its premise: players are tasked with using visual elements from the 23 paintings that famed Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky created in 1924 to create a brand new work — a "24th Kandinsky". This is a game about not just admiring art but digging into it and picking apart its components, and all that's required to play is a blank canvas, some paper and drawing implements, a pair of scissors, and some sticky tack or tape. On each of their turns, a player selects an element from one of Kandinsky's newly-public-domain works — choosing from all the geometric shapes, swooping curves, checkered grids, intersecting lines and other abstract forms that are the hallmark of his work — and draws a replica of it, which they then cut out and affix to the canvas wherever they choose. They can overlap and underlap other elements as the new work grows, and at the end of each round all players vote to determine who made the best contribution, leaving their element in place while the others from the round are removed. Turn by turn the work grows more elaborate, until time runs out or players agree to stop, at which point the player who won the most voting rounds gets to keep the completed work.There is just so much to love about this idea and its execution. It manages to celebrate just about everything that we hope to highlight with these game jams: the value of new works entering the public domain, the incredible creative power of remixing and appropriation, the joy of artistic collaboration and spontaneous creativity, and the way games can be an ideal medium for all these things — for both game designers and players. Mechanically speaking, it does this with elegance: the rules are loose and simple, but carefully combine cooperative and competitive gameplay to achieve a balance of incentives that produces just the right mood for a game like this. It also serves as a foundation for people to create their own variants of the game: one can easily envision it being adapted to use different source material, more elaborate art supplies, and even modified rules to create different overall rhythms of play. And with every play session, a new piece of art is created, and that's a special thing for a game to achieve.You can download the rules and materials for The 24th Kandinsky on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam.And with that, we've reached the end of our game jam winner spotlight series! One more time, thanks to everyone who submitted a game or played the entries, and to our amazing panel of judges. We'll be back next year with a game jam for works from 1925, but until then, keep on mining that public domain!

The First Circuit Court of Appeals has confirmed what we've already assumed: the "community caretaking" function law enforcement performs is there to help it dodge the Constitution, not to ensure it actually takes care of the community. Citing Simpsons' episode BABF18*, Judge Selya (trigger warning: overwrought English) says nothing about the community caretaking function prevents officers from harming you. But it does not mean officers ever need to help you.*Judge Selya does not actually cite this, but let's just take a look at what these decisions actually mean:The Supreme Court has made it clear -- repeatedly -- that officers are under no obligation to "serve and protect," with emphasis on the latter. You're on your own as a citizen when it comes to harm being inflicted on you. Cops are here to file reports and investigate the tragic aftermath of the harm inflicted on you. They are under no obligation to protect you against violence, even if you've repeatedly informed them someone means to do you harm.But cops suddenly become inspired and proactive members of the community when it comes to the community caretaking exception, which allows them to perform searches and seizures without a warrant. In the interest of protecting the community, cops will tow your car and perform a pretextual search. But they'll also go into your house and there's nothing in the Fourth Amendment that can prevent that, apparently.Selya opens the First Circuit's opinion [PDF] by painting a rosy picture of cops as local heroes who would never abuse rights to achieve their own ends.

With the Coronavirus grinding everything to a halt (except for stock market losses! [sobs in 401(k)]), it's understandable that public services would be affected as well. The unexpected shift to telecommuting means everything is going to slow down as public and private entities figure out how to still serve customers/citizens while still keeping the spread of the virus to a minimum.But none of that explains this completely incomprehensible response from the FBI, which appears to be using the virus as a way to become even more tight-fisted with its stash of FOIA-able files. "FOIA terrorist" Jason Leopold reports the FBI is seeking to serve the public in the worst way possible during this national health crisis.

Shout it from the rooftops: content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Mistakes will always be made, or even "legitimate" decisions will appear "wrong" to many, many people. The latest example: Twitter -- which has received criticism for being both too aggressive in shutting down accounts and not nearly aggressive enough (sometimes by the same people) -- suspended Cory Doctorow's account earlier this week. The reasoning for the suspension? He would put various trolls onto a Twitter list called "colossal assholes" before muting them, and Twitter claimed this violated its policies (though the company only told him well after it suspended him):

It's been one full year since Rep. Devin Nunes kicked off his long series of frivolous SLAPP suits against various critics. While the suing of satirical Twitter accounts still get the most headlines, two of the lawsuits (including the first one) target Liz Mair, a political consultant who has worked on numerous Republican campaigns (and was a spokesperson for the RNC). It's still unclear why Nunes targeted Mair in particular, who has pointed out how this is a clear attempt at stifling free speech, but he seems particularly annoyed with her. Most elected officials learn that part of being in public office is that you get criticized, but Nunes seems to think that anyone who criticizes him deserves to get sued. Mair has now launched a new website, NunesVFreeSpeech.com, seeking donations for her own legal defense, and in defense of free speech. Mair also agreed to answer some questions I had about her experiences over the last year in dealing with this lawsuit.

Say hello to the coronavirus and goodbye to privacy. The government is working with a variety of tech companies -- including infamous analytics companies like Palantir -- to get a grasp on the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, this means the data citizens have generated for a variety of tech companies will become a handy way to track them and their movements, especially if they're infected or in contact with those who are.

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Nothing like a pandemic to really make it clear what a terrible person you are, huh? Law360's Bill Donahue (who is not a terrible person!) has cataloged attempts by terrible people to register trademarks related to the pandemic:

In an effort to turn an unmitigated disaster into something a bit more mitigated, governments around the world are heading towards the "drastic" end of the scale to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Cities and everything in them have been effectively shut down. Preventing the spread of the virus depends a lot on the voluntary cooperation of citizens to self-report and self-quarantine. Meanwhile, no one has any toilet paper. What a time to be alive, at least temporarily.How do you enforce "voluntary" quarantine without filling cities with cops and/or soldiers? You turn to the tracking devices nearly everyone carries. Extreme times/extreme measures and all that, so every bit of location data hoovered up by carriers of phones and/or viruses is now apparently fair game.It's already happening in the countries we expect it to happen in. China is still being China, except moreso:

Charter Communications literally has some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any company in any industry in America. Like Comcast, Charter has spent years merging its way to market domination, and now enjoys a notable monopoly over broadband in numerous U.S. markets. This monopoly, combined with regulatory capture, has resulted in a company that literally doesn't have to give a damn about its customers.As it turns out, the company doesn't treat its employees much better.For the last few days, both Gizmodo and TechCrunch have been fielding complaints from a torrent of Spectrum employees who say the company is putting them at unnecessary risk. Employees who say there's no technical reason they can't perform their work remotely have been mandated to continue coming into the office, despite CDC warnings that social distancing will be essential to slow the spread of the pandemic across the United States. Several employees sent internal memos warning all employees the company was ignoring CDC recommendations:

Senator Richard Burr is a real piece of work. In 2012 he was one of only three Senators to vote against the STOCK Act. This was a law put in place following a 60 Minutes expose about how Congress was getting filthy stinkin' rich off of insider trading, since Congress was exempt from insider trading laws. The bill did pass -- Burr's vote against notwithstanding -- and President Obama signed into law. Unfortunately, the next year, Congress passed (and Obama signed) an amendment that rolled the rules back for staffers, though it still does apply to elected officials themselves.So, it's quite interesting to see the news that Senator Burr just sold off a "significant percentage" of his stock holdings, according to a ProPublica article detailing the sale. A big chunk of that stock sale? In the hospitality industry that has been so hard hit. He had a big chunk of stock in Wyndam Hotels and Extended Stay America, but sold those off just before everything went bad. The timing is interesting:

Right-to-repair laws are still a work in progress, mainly due to industry opposition. The wants and needs of millions of device/vehicle owners don't amount to a hill of beans in this world full of interloping industry leaders, as noted DIY repairman/nightclub owner Rick Blaine once sourly noted.Allowing people to actually own the things they've purchased seems like a foreign concept to US tech leaders, even though that was the status quo long before goods went digital and the DMCA was enacted. Why should people be at the mercy of those whose profits depend on walled gardens, closed loops, and well-funded lawyers issuing cease-and-desist orders at the drop of a proprietary screwdriver? Well, as someone else sourly noted, those with the gold make the rules.While we struggle through with some piecemeal replacements for our assumed rights of ownership here in the US, it appears the European Union is going to get serious about handing customers back their purloined rights. As the New York Times reports, a right-to-repair is up for discussion -- not so much because of the impact on customers, but because of the impact on the environment.

There's a growing list of things that the COVID-19 crisis has exposed as unnecessary nonsense. Broadband usage caps come first to mind, followed quickly by a lingering disdain for telecommuting by a long list of executives. But the outbreak is also shining a light on another dumb practice that has long been a point of contention: Hollywood movie release windows.For the better part of a decade now, we've highlighted Hollywood's often vicious opposition to disrupting the traditional delay between a film's theatrical debut, and its release on home video or streaming platforms. Companies like Netflix that have attempted to disrupt this system have traditionally been quickly demonized by the industry. AMC, Regal and Cinemark have all fought tooth and nail to preserve the (usually) 90 day restriction period between a film's theater release and its availability to home consumers, even if such restrictions no longer make much sense in the broadband era.Movie patrons, like most other sensible people, are now practicing social distancing in a bid to slow COVID-19's expansion and ease the looming strain on already maxed out US healthcare systems. In some locations (like here in Seattle), movie theaters are being told to close their doors entirely. In the process, Hollywood is having to suddenly and quickly rethink its longstanding dedication to a release window model that already made no sense in the modern world, and makes even less sense in the wake of a pandemic quarantine.Disney, for example, is now considering moving big releases more quickly to its Disney+ streaming video platform:

Last summer, we wrote about yet another post-Blurred Lines decision, showing that any two random songs that sounded kinda a little similar, might be ripe for a court to find infringing. In this case, it was a Katy Perry song, Dark Horse, that was found to infringe on a little known artist named "Flame," who had a song called "Joyful Noise." As we noted at the time, the similarities between the song were simply basic and fundamental building blocks of music. As that article points out:

If at first you don't get punished, plant, plant again.

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As noted earlier this week, a Softbank-owned patent troll, Fortress Investment Group, spun up a shell company Labrador Diagnostics this month, and days after the company came into existence, it sued a company working on COVID-19 diagnostics, claiming that the technology it used for those tests violated the patents it had bought from Theranos -- the sham of a company that went down in flames, and whose founders are still facing federal charges for fraud. Oh, and Fortress/Labrador/Softbank was using the law firm Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once sued on behalf of a monkey over copyright. On a related note, the current head of the US Patent Office, Andrei Iancu, used to be the managing director of that law firm, and to this day insists that there's no such thing as a patent troll. He should perhaps talk to his former partner, Morgan Chu.As you probably heard (because Irell & Manella made sure to reach out to everyone mocking them for this lawsuit), within hours of my post going viral, "Labrador Diagnostics" (again, a company that literally did not exist a few weeks ago) put out a press release saying that (1) it didn't know that BioFire was working on a COVID-19 test (which is questionable, given that the Wall Street Journal and other publications had mentioned it, but I guess Labrador didn't even exist when that article came out, so...), and (2) that it had "offered" a royalty-free license on COVID-19 tests once it realized. As we pointed out, the details and conditions of that "offer" still have not been made clear.However, as Josh Landau at Patent Progress notes, even if Labrador/Fortress/Softbank is actually offering such a license, it's completely worthless, because the lawsuit is still claiming patent infringement on the machine BioFire is using to run the diagnostic:

Be it Cambridge Analytica, Equifax, or wireless carrier location data, the U.S. has already faced a steady parade of privacy and security related scandals. Now as countries around the world hunker down to slow the rate of COVID-19, the problem could easily grow even larger as a chain reaction of implications make privacy, security, and tools like encryption more important than ever.Millions of Americans are now telecommuting for the first time. As they do so, more than a few of them won't be wise enough to use basic security precautions while handling sensitive work or health related data. And as we've noted for years, services like VPNs often don't provide reliable protection, given it's hard to verify just how secure or trustworthy service owners are. Many services were already shady as hell, and even the reliable offerings may struggle under the load.Many folks are already using the pandemic as scam fodder. As a result, the shift to home work -- and the dramatic spike in healthcare information being shoveled around the internet -- means that the battle over encryption is also more important than ever:

As it has always been, the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it. Reporters Without Borders is ensuring forbidden information is getting into the hands of whoever wants it, no matter what their government feels they should or shouldn't read.The nexus point isn't a website tucked away on the dark web, only accessible via VPN and a Tor connection. It's right there out in the open, delivered via a platform very few governments have bothered to censor. Here's Reporters Without Borders' understated announcement of its damage-dodging info dump:

Techdirt writes about freedom of information matters often enough. Sadly, many of the stories are about governments and other official bodies refusing to comply with local Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws for various reasons, and using a variety of tricks. In other words, rights to FOI may exist in theory, but the practice falls woefully short. That makes the following story from the UK a welcome exception.It concerns Nicola Young, a local government employee in the English market town of Whitchurch, in Shropshire. Part of her job as town clerk was to handle FOIA requests for the local council. One such request asked for a copy of the audio recording of a council meeting. Apparently the person requesting the file believed that the written minutes of the meeting had been fabricated, and wanted to check them against the recording. However, the reply came back that the file had already been deleted, as was required by the official council policy.Undeterred, the person requesting the file sent a complaint to the UK's main Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which carried out an investigation. The ICO discovered that the town clerk had not only claimed that the audio file had already been deleted when it actually existed, but that she personally deleted it a few days after the FOI request was made. Quite why is not clear, but as a result:

As we've been discussing for a while, India's government has blacked out internet access in Kashmir since around August, setting records for one of the longest government-mandated internet blackouts in history. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to argue that the blackout is a necessary security precaution in the face of growing unrest in the region stemming from its loss of autonomy earlier this year. Granted, like most government internet censorship efforts, the move has a lot more to do with cowardice and fear of an informed public than any genuine concern about public welfare.Despite the Indian Supreme Court declaring such restrictions illegal last January, the problem persists. And as a pandemic threatens the planet, these restrictions are making it hard for the residents of Kashmir to access essential medical information on COVID-19:

Sing it with me, folks: content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Over the last few weeks, all of the big social media platforms have talked about their intense efforts to block misinformation about Covid-19. It appeared to be something of an all hands on deck situation for employees (mostly working from home) at these companies. Indeed, earlier this week, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube all released a joint statement about how they're working together to fight Covid-19 misinformation, and hoping other platforms would join in.However, battling misinformation is not always so easy -- as Facebook discovered yesterday. Yesterday afternoon a bunch of folks started noticing that Facebook was blocking all sorts of perfectly normal content, including NY Times stories about Covid-19. Now, we can joke all we want about some of the poor NY Times reporting, but to argue that its reporting on Covid-19 is misinformation would be, well, misinformation itself. There was some speculation, a la YouTube's warning that this could be due to content moderators being sent home -- and not being allowed to do their content moderation duties over privacy concerns, but the company said that it was "a bug in an anti-spam system" and was "unrelated to any changes in our content moderation workforce." Whether you buy that or not is your choice.Still, it's a reminder that any effort to block misinformation is going to be fraught with problems and mistakes, and trying to adapt rapidly, especially on a big (the biggest) news story with rapidly changing factors and new information (and misinformation) all the time, is going to run into some problems sooner or later.

The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals has looked at the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision and decided it applies to cell site location info, even when that information was obtained by law enforcement years before the Supreme Court came to this conclusion. (via Courthouse News)The location records obtained from AT&T without a warrant destroyed the accused murderer's alibi. From the decision [PDF]:

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Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well in the best of times, but the solutions that seem to at least keep it from devolving into a total mess almost always use a combination of humans and technology working together. But what do you do when the humans are sick, self-isolating, quarantined, etc? While I imagine some may be able to work from home, it's a difficult time to expect anyone to be at full productivity. So YouTube has made it clear that it's turning over more content moderation decisions to the machines knowing full well that some of those decisions are going to be bad:

As millions of Americans begin to work and learn from home in a bid to slow the spread of COVID-19, America's patchy and expensive broadband networks are likely to get a workout. To be clear, the shift will certainly highlight the broken US telecom market, at least in terms of patchy availability, limited competition, and high prices. But most experts say US networks should be able to shoulder the load without too much difficulty.As of last week, giants like AT&T and Verizon say they hadn't seen a massive surge in internet usage yet, and insisted they'd be able to shoulder any load once usage ramps up further:

The FBI continues to avoid playing its hand honestly in the "going dark" debate. It continues to do things like call strong encryption "warrant-proof" encryption, damning it by associating its very existence with unlawfulness. FBI Director Chris Wray continues to claim he's not asking for encryption backdoors while calling for encryption backdoors. And for nearly two years, the FBI has refused to update its erroneous count of uncracked devices in its possession.The last time the FBI delivered a number, it claimed it had about 7,800 devices in its possession that it couldn't get into. After being questioned by Congress about its claims, the FBI went back to count devices and found its tracking method had resulted in a severe miscount. No real number has been delivered yet, but the early estimate was that the actual number was slightly over 1,000 devices. Not quite the apocalypse the FBI needed us (and our Congressional reps) to believe it was.As usual, when the government fails, private citizens step in to do the work that government agencies are spending our tax dollars not doing. The DOJ and FBI have spent years hardly bothering to compile an accurate accounting of police use of deadly force, resulting in a small cottage industry of journalists, activists, and hobbyists doing the work for them.The same thing can be said about the "going dark" narrative. The FBI loves the narrative but can't be bothered to provide any hard data backing its assertions that encryption is destroying the criminal justice system. So, it's left up to people like Joseph Cox and his team members at Motherboard to try to get a grip on how often device encryption is disrupting criminal investigations.Using information gathered from more than 500 iPhone search warrants and other court records, Motherboard has compiled a database that gives readers a better idea of encryption's impact on law enforcement investigations -- a narrative stripped of all the competing narratives, if you will.In conclusion, Going Dark is a land of contrasts:

There has been some absolutely ridiculous sniping between the Chinese government and the US government over "blame" for Covid-19. For idiotic reasons, President Trump and his sycophantic followers started referring to Covid-19 as "The Chinese Virus," a racist term that hints at putting blame on Chinese people for the virus or even implying that those of Chinese ancestry are more risky than others. The administration also stupidly limited the number of Chinese staffers allowed at the US bureaus of Chinese news organizations, partly in response to China expelling three Wall Street Journal reporters over a headline it didn't like.The Chinese government responded in an even more idiotic manner, trying to blame Americans for the disease.

Just another reminder the Drug Enforcement Agency doesn't care all that much about drugs and/or enforcement. If there's money to be made, the DEA is all in. If it can score easy wins by engaging in entrapment, it will. But the drugs will flow and the damage will be done. And the DEA will be there to hoover up the cash… even when the cash has nothing to do with drugs.The DEA stole another person's life savings back in 2015. A raid of house predicated on the theory Miladis Salgado's husband was involved in drug dealing ended with the DEA walking off with $15,000 Salgado had saved for her daughter's quinceanera. This was money Salgado had saved while working at a duty-free shop in the Miami airport, along with gifts from friends and relatives.And it all was gone after the DEA raided her house. The good news is Salgado eventually got her money back. But it took time and it took a lawyer. In the end, the DEA admitted it had no evidence tying her husband to drug trafficking.

Techdirt has just written about the extraordinary legal action taken against a company producing Covid-19 tests. Sadly, it's not the only example of some individuals putting profits before people. Here's a story from Italy, which is currently seeing more new coronavirus cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world. Last Thursday, a hospital in Brescia, in the north of Italy, needed supplies of special valves in order to use breathing equipment to help keep Covid-19 patients alive in intensive care (original in Italian). The manufacturer was unable to provide them because of the demand for this particular valve. The Metro site explains what happened next:

Yesterday I wrote up a fairly insane story about how a Softbank-owned patent troll, Fortress Investment Group, through a shell company subsidiary, Labrador Diagnostics (which, despite its name, does not seem to do any diagnostics), using patents that it had bought up from the sham medical testing company Theranos during its fire sale, had sued BioFire Diagnostics/BioMerieux, one of the few companies making a Covid-19 diagnostics test, claiming patent infringement. The patent infringement claims were on all of its diagnostics created using BioFire's FilmArray 2.0, FilmArray EZ, and FilmArray Torch devices -- and the company's Covid-19 tests were based on that technology. Even worse, the company asked the court to issue an injunction, blocking BioFire from using the tests. As we pointed out, this was not just tone deaf, but destructive and dangerous.This morning, hours after our article went viral, Labrador Diagnostics issued a press release claiming that once it became aware that BioFire was working on Covid-19 tests, it had offered the company a royalty-free license on those tests (and only those tests):

For all the fears and freak-outs over "disinformation" on social media, over the past few weeks Twitter, especially, has been an amazing source for getting accurate, thoughtful information regarding the Covid-19 pandemic and how to deal with it. It's a pretty stark contrast, in fact, between people who seemed to be paying attention to credible voices on social media, and who began "social distancing" sooner, and those who were getting their information from politicians and television (especially cable news) who seemed to wave off the dangers for way too long. That's not to say there hasn't been disinformation about Covid-19 online -- including some spread by politicians and crackpots. However, on the whole, social media has done what it does best: allowed credible, knowledgeable voices to rise to the top for many.As Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason notes, COVID-19 Reminds Us: Social Media Is Good, Actually:

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As the EARN IT Act moves forward -- with all of its Section 230 and encryption-threatening appendages still intact -- we're getting some very interesting responses from tech companies that have benefitted from Section 230 and/or rely on strong encryption.The goal may be noble -- the protection of children from sexual abuse -- but those noble goals are just a crowd-pleasing dodge. It's an assault on both Section 230 and strong encryption that's being pushed with an anti-child porn narrative, one that makes it very difficult for legislators to oppose. To vote against EARN IT, supporters will misleadingly claim, is to vote for the spread of child porn, so it's going to be tough to find lawmakers willing to push back.Attorney General Bill Barr wants encryption broken. If it means American citizens are less protected, so be it… just as long as the FBI can get into a few more locked devices or accounts. Plenty of people in the administration seem to feel Section 230 has to go, if only to make it easier to sue platforms for perceived slights.Entities that used to be allied against Section 230 reform and encryption-breaking are now for it. The Electronic Privacy Information Center wants to do both somehow. It has sent a letter [PDF] in support of the EARN IT Act that is pure cognitive dissonance. EPIC claims it wants to see Section 230 reformed but somehow keep this "reform" from threatening the encryption of end-to-end communications. How it imagines this law will achieve both aims is nearly impossible to discern.The letter says Section 230 must be reformed, but for something much lower on the "for the children" list.

While it required some nudging, several of the nation's biggest ISPs this week announced they would be suspending their usage caps and overage fees as millions of Americans prepare to hunker down to slow the spread of COVID-19. Comcast, AT&T, and Centurylink all stopped imposing such limits for at least the next 90 days. Critics (and even leaked Comcast memos) have long made it clear such restrictions (particularly on fixed line networks) aren't technically useful in managing congestion as the industry once claimed, and are little more than glorified price hikes on captive customers.The speed at which such restrictions were dispatched (during a time when overall bandwidth consumption is up, no less) supports industry executive claims that such limits are arbitrary, confusing, and unnecessary.That said, numerous ISPs say they're taking additional steps to ensure users can stay online during the outbreak. For example, a coalition of several dozen ISPs struck a voluntary "Keep Americans Connected Pledge" that they wouldn't kick users offline during the outbreak for lack of payment due to Coronavirus, and wouldn't impose late fees either. From the FCC announcement:

Last week, we were perplexed as to why House Democrats had agreed to an extension of NSA/FBI surveillance powers for a President they keep insisting is incompetent and vindictive against anyone he dislikes. At the same time, we couldn't figure out why Republicans were so keen to support it at the same time they were insisting that those same powers were used by the "deep state" to spy on the President's own campaign. After it passed, President Trump hinted that he might veto it anyway, and now with the Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, the Senate has agreed to punt on the issue for the time being, extending the FISA authorities for 77 days, with a promise of debating real reform in the interim:

Clearview's claims that its controversial facial recognition program is only for use by law enforcement agencies continues to be exposed as a lie. Documents obtained by BuzzFeed showed the company has sold its tech to a variety of private companies, including major retailers like Kohl's and Walmart.It's also expanding its reach across the globe, pitching its products to dozens of countries, including those known mostly for their human rights violations. Even when it limits itself to law enforcement agencies, it still can't help lying -- exaggerating its success and assistance in criminal investigations.Before Clearview became a plaything for government agencies and private corporations, it was a toy for the rich and powerful. Kashmir Hill -- who broke the first story about Clearview's problematic image-scraping operation -- has a followup in the New York Times detailing the company's unpleasant origin story.

Honestly, I wasn't sure how to begin this story or how to fit all the insanity into the title. It's a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once claimed it could represent a monkey in a copyright infringement dispute. You see, Irell & Manella has now filed one of the most utterly bullshit patent infringement lawsuits you'll ever see. They are representing "Labrador Diagnostics LLC" a patent troll which does not seem to exist other than to file this lawsuit, and which claims to hold the rights to two patents (US Patents 8,283,155 and 10,533,994) which, you'll note, were originally granted to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos -- the firm that shut down in scandal over medical testing equipment that appears to have been oversold and never actually worked. Holmes is still facing federal charges of wire fraud over the whole Theranos debacle.However, back in 2018, the remains of Theranos sold its patents to Fortress Investment Group. Fortress Investment Group is a SoftBank-funded massive patent troll. You may remember the name from the time last fall when Apple and Intel sued the firm, laying out how Fortress is a sort of uber-patent troll, gathering up a bunch of patents and then shaking down basically everyone. Lovely, right?So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, "Labrador Diagnostics," which decided that right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making Covid-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those Covid-19 tests.A bit more background here: the company they're suing, BioFire, recently launched three Covid-19 tests built off of the company's FilmArray technology. And that's what "Labrador" (read: SoftBank) is now suing over. From the lawsuit:

A year ago, I was at a round table discussion, where someone was doing one of the standard rants we've all heard, about how big internet companies were evil because they were focused on profits over the health of their user base, etc. I pointed out that while this narrative had taken hold among many people outside of these internet companies, it didn't seem to reflect what I was hearing from those within those companies -- especially as they were investing heavily in "trust & safety" teams, including both hiring people and building technology, that would provide better overall experiences on the platform. Instead, I suggested, their complaint seemed to be more with Wall Street investors, and the short term profits that it demanded from many public companies. There are the Jeff Bezos/Amazon exceptions -- where he basically told Wall Street to go put their head in a bucket for many years while he re-invested in the business as they demanded profits -- but for the most part, public companies are put on a short leash, not so much by management expectations, but the demands of investors.I'm thinking about that a lot again, following the news of the proxy fight over Twitter's management that was raised just recently. At the beginning of the month, it was revealed that Paul Singer's massive hedge fund Elliott Management had taken a large stake in Twitter, and wanted major changes, including getting rid of founder/CEO Jack Dorsey. A few days later, it was revealed that a deal was struck between Twitter and Elliott Management to keep Dorsey in charge... for now. However, it seems that the situations is fairly tenuous. Elliott Management now has a board seat, and a promise of some very tricky "growth" targets (especially tricky in the face of who knows what's coming with the economy during a pandemic).The details of those metrics makes it seem clear that Elliott Management is forcing Twitter down a specific path -- one that is likely to make the user experience for Twitter users much, much worse:

Mobile voting app Voatz is still a mess. Two years ago, West Virginia decided to give the app a spin to allow some voters to vote from home during the midterm elections. Nobody in the security world thought this was a good idea. The only people who did feel this was a safe, secure way to collect votes were state legislators and Voatz itself. Some early poking and prodding by security researchers immediately found problems with Voatz's handling of votes, including out-of-date SSH and unproven facial recognition tech that was supposed to verify voters by matching their selfies to their government IDs.Two-and-a-half years later, not much has improved. Voatz is still courting state governments, trying to talk them into using its app to allow the housebound and those overseas to vote in their elections. An MIT study of the software found multiple issues, including flaws that would allow attackers to intercept votes -- and alter or trash them -- without anyone on either end realizing they'd been hacked.Voatz responded badly, insulting the researchers and claiming its server-side software would miraculously prevent the described attack from happening. When the researchers pointed out Voatz was wrong about its own software, it published a blog post attacking the researchers as "publicity hounds" seeking to disrupt the election process.Another month has passed and it's more bad news for Voatz. Voatz and Tusk Philanthropies hired cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits to perform a security audit of its software. Guess what? It's still a mess.

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First off, I hope that everyone reading this, and their friends, families, loved ones, etc, are staying safe -- and I urge you to stay safe as well, which means staying home as much as possible. I did want to at least put up a post noting that these are unique and unprecedented times, and I honestly have no idea what this will mean for Techdirt over the next few weeks or months. We may very well be posting less. I don't know if our posting focus will change. I have some posts on the way that touch on the pandemic situation, and plenty that don't, and while I want to continue covering other things, it feels like we're in a moment where pretty much the only thing that is going to matter for the near future is how we deal with the pandemic.We will try to continue on in the same way we always have done, but I don't know what that will actually look like.While the team here is already effectively remote, and you might think that means we should be able to carry on as usual (or even moreso, since we're all pretty much limited in going out and about), I think that's an impossible request as well. Many people are now also dealing with watching children or parents or other relatives, all the time, and that obviously takes time, attention and energy. At the same time, all of us are watching the news and are concerned about what this means for our own health, the health of our loved ones, and the health of everyone else around the globe. It's a frightening and uncertain time -- and that, by itself, makes less than ideal working conditions for anyone. These are not times when I expect anyone, myself included, to be as productive as normal.So, I at least wanted to put up a note that says, more or less, I have no idea what will be happening at Techdirt over the next few weeks and months. We have a new project that we were excited to launch before the end of the month -- and that may still happen, or we may put it off. I don't know how many posts we'll have or what topics they'll be on. I don't know if anyone will feel like recording podcasts, or if I'll feel like recording podcasts. I just don't know.I know that lots of people are now concerned about their own jobs and their own financial position, and I hope that everything works out okay for everyone. I will note, also, that we've already heard from some of our own sponsors and backers, who have put off decisions on sponsorship. Also, a decent part of our revenue last year, and in our planning for this year, was for live events, all of which have now been put on indefinite hiatus -- meaning that if you're not in dire financial straits due to everything else, and are in a position to do so, we'd truly appreciate the support to make sure that we can keep going through these trying times. If you want the most direct way of supporting us, it's to do direct donations via this page, but the general support page lists many different ways to support us, some of which get you nice things in response, beyond the warm feeling of helping Techdirt continue.But, the most important point of all: please, everyone, stay safe out there.

We've noted for years how as US telcos have given up on upgrading their aging DSL lines, they've effectively helped cement a bigger monopoly for cable giants like Comcast and Spectrum in countless markets nationwide. A recent study estimated that 40 million Americans can't get broadband at all -- double FCC estimates. And FCC data indicates that in 44% of US markets, users have the choice of only one ISP at speeds of 25 Mbps or higher. More often than not, your only option for "real" broadband is probably going to be Comcast.Even if you're "lucky" enough to have the choice of two options, telcos and cablecos don't go out of their way to actually compete. Combine this lack of competition with the Trump administration's decision to effectively neuter FCC consumer protection authority, and these mono/duopolies have less incentive than ever to compete on price, improve terrible customer service, avoid net neutrality and privacy violations, or expand service into the many under-served corners of the US.It's a problem that's slowly but surely getting worse. The latest data from Leichtman Research indicates that the nation's eight biggest cable broadband providers added 3.14 million broadband subscribers in 2019, reaching a total of 67.98 million. In contrast, the nation's top eight traditional phone companies, which offer a mix of fiber and DSL, lost a combined 619,605 subscribers to reach a historic low of 33.24 million subscribers last year:AT&T, Verizon, Windstream, CenturyLink, and Frontier are all losing subscribers because they've largely given up on fixed residential broadband in countless markets. Most long ago shifted their focus to enterprise services, video advertising, or anything other than residential broadband, which has never been profitable enough, quickly enough for their liking. As a result, DSL lines aren't being upgraded (or even repaired), service is no longer being seriously expanded, and consumers are heading to their only alternatives: either a capped and expensive cellular connection, or a capped and expensive cable broadband line.Leichtman notes that at the end of 2019, cable broadband providers had a 67% fixed broadband market share versus 33% for US telcos. That 67% market share is the highest level since the third quarter of 2001. So despite all the talk about gigabit fiber, our breathless dedication to the "digital divide," and the "race to 5G," the biggest untold story in US broadband remains the fact that cable monopolies are growing bigger and more powerful at the same time we strip away all of the government's consumer protection authority. What could possibly go wrong?And while 5G is often bandied about as a panacea to this problem, the same issues that have plagued traditional broadband are going to be replicated with 5G: including high prices, regional mono/duopolies (this time over cell tower fiber backhaul), feckless, industry-captured regulators, and an unwillingness by carriers to spend the money needed to seriously deploy to under-served areas.There's some hope that low orbit satellites from the likes of Amazon and Space X could finally disrupt this broken-ass status quo, but having seen numerous disruptive efforts scuttled by the industry's dominant and politically-powerful incumbents over the last few decades, genuine US telecom disruption at any meaningful scale is something you'll need to see before you believe it.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David, taking a moment to process one particular comment from the Michigan State Police who were taking well-deserved flak on Twitter for bragging about stealing $40,000 from a driver:

We're nearing the end of our series about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. So far we've looked at Hot Water, Legends of Charlemagne, 192X, and The Hounds Follow All Things Down, and this week the feature is the winner of Best Digital Game: You Are The Rats In The Walls by Alex Blechman.This not just a returning win for Alex, but a second in the digital game category, following last year's win with Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening To Steal Treasure. While Stopping By Woods was a Twine-based remix of a Robert Frost poem, Rats brings things into the graphical realm with RPG Maker and takes on one of the more notable 1924 works to enter the public domain this year: H. P. Lovecraft's short story The Rats In The Walls. And both games have one thing in common: a sense of humor that pervades the writing and design. Rats takes the famous story — in which a man returns to his family's ancestral estate and discovers horrible secrets that drive him mad, made manifest in the form of scurrying rats that torment him — and gives the player the role of the titular vermin via a simple game mechanic: nipping at the character's heels to drive him towards various locations on the small but detailed map. Alongside this, it embraces a simple and highly effective comedy premise: combining the elaborate, heavily-wrought prose that Lovecraft is famous for with modern, casual, highly self-aware language. The result is consistently funny, with a few great surprise jokes and an absurd overall tone that just works.As you can see, Rats also makes great use of RPG Maker assets to build a fitting and eye-catching (if unpolished) setting for the game, which was the first thing that made it a contender for the Best Digital Game category, but what really sealed the deal in that regard was the aforementioned game mechanic of driving the character around by controlling the rats that chase him. It's nothing mindblowing, and it can be (intentionally) frustrating, but it adds an element of gameplay and leverages the digital medium to make Rats something slightly more than just a simple story dressed up with sprite graphics (and also undoubtedly required some scripting to go beyond RPG Maker's basic capabilities). The mechanic also successfully makes the basic level of choice in the story (which just amounts to determining what order things unfold in) feel more integrated with the game. All this combines with the excellent writing to create a short experience that keeps players closely engaged from start to finish.You can play You Are The Rats In The Walls in your browser on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam. And come back next week for the final winner spotlight!